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exiles, it is clear that Reisz’s personal background is
crucial to any understanding of his cinema, not only because of his own
exile from Nazism and subsequent displacement into a foreign culture, but
also, like the directors of the French New Wave, because of his graduation
into film-making from the academic world of film criticism, a realm largely
alien to many of the veterans of the British film industry. It would thus

focused kind of representation.
Literary criticism has always tended to interpret texts
diegetically, either as an acknowledged fiction presented by an author,
or against a particular standard of representation (e.g. the realists).
In my sense mimesis is neither of these, but more closely resembles what
it was for Plato: the new device, the ‘unacceptable’
imitative device for representation; the device

1
The novel and its critics
Criticism of the novel begins at whatever date one picks as the birth of
the novel. Published during the Restoration period around which the
present study circles, Pierre-Daniel Huët’s Traité de l’origine des romans
(1670) suggests itself as an inaugural text, whose importance is
underlined by the fact that it quickly found its way into other European
languages, seeing an English translation in 1672 and a German version in 1682. Huët set out ‘to ennoble the genre with an impeccable
pedigree of Greco-Roman precedents and to diffuse

T HIS book has given a reading of Peter Carey’s work stressing the different aspects in the political concerns of his fiction, an approach which has so far not had widespread treatment by other critics, and indicating his critiques of multinational capitalism, the legacies of colonial history, exploitative power relationships, and sexual roles as of particular interest. While doing so, it has picked up on the main trends in Carey criticism, especially views of Carey as a fabulist or surrealist, as a post-modernist and as a post

the stories that we tell about reading, the claims that we make on its behalf, and the ways that we think about it in relation to ourselves and society. Within this imaginary, ‘close reading’ suggests a greater-than-average level of focused observation. Clearly, there have always been attentive readers, but ‘close reading’ asserts a particular kind of a professionalised legitimacy. It emerges from broadly the same historical moment as the Leavises’ quarrel with Woolf over ‘common’ reading and, like Leavisite criticism, ‘close’ reading proclaims a ‘rigour’ and

Conclusion – Being Don(n)e
Here where by All All Saints invoked are,
’Twere too much schisme to be singular,
And ’gainst a practise generall to warre.
[. . .]
May therefore this be’enough to testifie
My true devotion, free from flattery;
He that beleeves himselfe, doth never lie.
(‘A Letter to the Lady Carey, and Mrs. Essex Riche, From
Amyens’, ll. 1–3, 61–3)
In the field of Donne studies, there is much to learn not only
about this writer’s amorous and religious desires but also about
the desires latent in literary criticism. Many Donne scholars
both want to be

7
Postscript: Bordwell’s interventions
This chapter moves outside of the historical and national boundaries of this study. The article on which it focuses – ‘Widescreen
Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism’ by David Bordwell – was
published in a North American journal, The Velvet Light Trap, in
1985.1 Nevertheless, there are a number of reasons that make it an
appropriate subject for the book’s final chapter.
The article is a significant example of the misrepresentation of
mise-­en-­scène criticism, and this significance is amplified because
the article is an

terms they now need to
be developed. In the process both the contemporary and the art of the contemporary
will be able to figure. What will emerge is that the nature of the contemporary and
the presence of contemporary art demand that the site of intervention be linked to
the act of criticism. In other words, art will not be able to intervene without the assistance of criticism. While criticism can always be presented such that it reiterates the
position in which diﬀerence is the work of an unending sameness, criticism cannot
be equated absolutely with a presentation

settler colonies,
teaching the literary canon could be regarded as a means of shoring up
the colonists’ sense of Britishness. This chapter examines a
different aspect of literary criticism’s involvement in the
cultural construction of the British Empire: the application of modern
critical approaches not to canonical ‘English literature’
but to the products of colonial literary cultures – usually with a

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Flying high? Culture, criticism,
theory since 1990
Scott Brewster
Lucy McDiarmid begins her review of The Cambridge History of Irish
Literature by reflecting on the upholstery of Aer Lingus seats, which
features quotations from James Connolly, Yeats, Shaw, and lines from
the sixteenth-century anonymous Gaelic lament for Kilcash. The quotations on the seats knit together the recurrent dynamics of Irish culture and society that have been interwoven since the twelfth century:
tradition and modernity, arrival